Simon Baker with Samson Coulter and Ben Spence on the set of Breath.
Photograph: David Dare Parker

“I’ve done a lot of work as an actor making a living that I’m not necessarily proud of, and I’d be quite happy if it just sort of disappeared, to be honest,” Simon Baker confesses. “I wanted something that might last a bit longer.”

The actor is best known in Australia for his television work, on procedural The Mentalist and drama The Guardian, but he’s currently promoting his feature film directorial debut: a big-screen adaptation of Tim Winton’s controversial novel Breath, in which he also stars.

“A lot of the roles that I’ve played, where they’re – on paper – only two dimensional [or] they’re not that rich, it’s because they’re generally devices,” he explains. Diplomatically, he doesn’t point fingers. “Often it doesn’t matter how much you bring to it; it’s just going to become what it is. That’s where being the director is a bit more interesting, because you can flush out the nuance and the detail.”

Set in 1970s Western Australia and shot in the coastal town of Denmark, Baker’s flick hews closely to Winton’s text. It follows Pikelet (Samson Coulter) and Loonie (Ben Spence) over a formative few years as they get taken in under the wing of the ageing surf legend Sando (Baker), and grow enraptured with Sando’s troubled wife, Eva (Elizabeth Debicki). Coulter and Spence were both amateur actors selected for their surfing ability, captured stunningly by water cinematographer Rick Rifici.

When Sando and Loonie head off on a surfing adventure without Pikelet, the teen finds comfort in Eva’s bed. She later raises the stakes in a manner that gives grave meaning to the title, pulling out a pink plastic bag and strap for Pikelet to affix to her head.

Having been written by Winton, the novel has plenty of local lingo – “ducks nuts” gets a guernsey twice – and reflects warmly yet solemnly on the loss of innocence. It confronts male identity and has its protagonist reckon with a fear of ordinariness and a very confused sexual awakening.

But in WA – where Winton lives and where nine of his texts are on the year 12 syllabus – Breath is known for one thing specifically: Eva’s dangerous infatuation with breath play, a taboo act that requires Pikelet to strangle or suffocate her during sex.

In the novel, Eva’s asphyxiophilia – or arousal through oxygen deprivation – is written as an eye-watering blow-by-blow account, with Pikelet describing the “evil, crinkly sound of the bag and the smeary film of her breath inside it”. But for the film, Baker edited the sequences elliptically, not showing much at all. He put a number of other sex scenes aside, while toning down the ferocity with which Pikelet takes to his task. (“I gently throttled her,” remembers Pikelet, as an older man in Winton’s book.)

Baker spent a long time thinking about how he’d approach the scenes. “There was a while there where I considered not even showing the bag over her head,” he says, before describing the shot order in precise detail, to emphasise that the remaining “two-second shot” and the suggestive images that follow are “far more potent”.

“In the book, it really goes there in a lot of ways, because you can do that in a book,” he says. “You don’t have to worry about ratings, you don’t have to worry about what’s going to turn an audience off.” By side-stepping the titular act, the film was awarded an M rating, which will mean it can still be studied in schools.

“With the book, it’s black ink on a white page, and you paint the picture and you join the dots yourself,” Baker says. “But, on a 30-foot screen, it’s there in front of you, and it can be far more confronting without a word spoken.”

Another omission in the film is the book’s tragic prologue and epilogue, featuring an adult Pikelet – now a paramedic haunted by his past and present kinks – encountering not one but two deaths by autoerotic asphyxiation. Instead, Baker keeps Breath planted in the 1970s.

“It’s just not going to work in a film,” he says of the excised chapters. “I wanted to make a film that, when you watched it, it felt like you felt when you read the book, as opposed to a checklist of literal translation of what the book is to the film. It wouldn’t make a good film if you just went through the book and put all the points down.”

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The idea of adapting Breath first came to producer Mark Johnson, who thought of Baker for the character of Sando, based on his heritage, history and love of surfing. Baker’s initial plan to simply produce alongside Johnson proved unsatisfying after he read the book and found himself ensnared.

“Normally, whenever I read anything that was related to surfing at all, I’d run a mile from it, because it always – in script form – felt a bit corny or cheesy,” he says. But after a few meetings with prospective directors, Johnson finally asked Baker if he was keen to take the helm: “I thought you’d never ask,” Baker says with a laugh.

Approaching the text, Baker was driven mostly by a fear of failing it. Like Pikelet, he was reckoning with the elemental fear of ordinariness. “[Before production began] I got a bit terrified and started to consider backing out of it, pulling out of it or just letting it fade away,” Baker admits. He confided in his wife, telling her: “I’m scared that I can’t make the film the way I want to make the film; as good as I want it to be.”

“[Winton’s] book is intact as a beautiful piece of work,” he says. “I could come unstuck and make a terrible movie completely, but I just needed to know I was free to go and do that. [Winton] was completely accommodating. He completely understood and he said, ‘you go mate, you go ahead and do it’.”

“I’m really proud of this movie and I still sort of pinch myself that we were able to pull it off at all. What I wanted to do with this movie [is] try to make a film that had a bit more longevity and, for my own personal satisfaction, [had] some kind of a legacy that I felt proud of.”

• Breath is in Australian cinemas now

• This article was amended on 9 May 2018. An earlier version referred to “autoerotic asphyxiation” in the subheading. This has been corrected to “erotic asphyxiation”.